Aperture isn’t everything.

Last year in anticipation of the Mars opposition I started looking for
a D&G Refractor. With the search magic
of Astromart, which archives everything, I found a 5” F/12 D&G
looking for a new home. The only drawback
was that it was in Australia. The current owner hadn’t been able to
find any buyers, partly due to customs concerns.

Well, that didn’t make any sense. D&G’s are made
in the USA, so reimporting it should be duty free.
So a deal was made, a slow boat shipper found
(cheaper to ship to LA than Seattle), customs declarations
signed, a niece-in-law to pick it up in LA and
hand it over to UPS, and here it is in Bozeman,
Montana (see picture at the end of this article). (Though I’ll never understand
why I needed to pay a $50 forklift fee for a package
that weighed 28 lbs.) The whole thing with shipping
cost me $1000 US. (First light: the Lyra double
doubles at 600 power!)

Onto the AP 800 Mount, and away to Mars we go. Attached are a series of
images taken in January after I finally
got my skill level up (Mars Preview images included for comparison). The
refractor is a traditional
crown and flint doublet, so chromatic aberration needs to be adjusted for,
and is done by reducing saturation in
K3CCD. It’s a fine balance between real color, false color, and no
color at all, and the adjustment becomes
difficult as Mars gets lower in the atmosphere. I’d love to try an
Aries Chromacor or Baader’s Fringe Killer,
but not on my budget.

So I’m very happy with my 5” D&G refractor, and I recommend
the club find a used one too and put it on the
24” (D&G’s come up on Astromart about twice a year). There
will often be seeing conditions that won’t justify
using the 24”, especially on planets, where a smaller aperture will
receive better results.

Processed in Registax 4, saved as TIFFS,
converted to BMPs and sorted in
IMERGE (all freeware, except for
K3CCD Tools, which is shareware).

Next up, Saturn!! (And 100 double stars).

Here’s Brian, and his Astrodog
Max, outside his Bozeman residence.
Brian runs his scope from
the house and has observed at -20
deg. F.

(Note: Toucams shut down at around
-15 deg. F.)

As a follow-up to this newsletter article, here is a summary of the Mars opposition as observed by Brian Close in
Bozeman. The top image is September 27th and the last bottom image is March 3rd. False color in the beginning is due to
Brian’s slow learning curve on adjusting for his refractor’s color aberration. The images were separate bitmaps
generated with Registax and assembled with I-Merge shareware.